Georgina Adam, the doyenne of art market reporters, gives a comprehensive overview of the Abu Dhabi Art Fair in the Financial Times:

Christie’s owner François Pinault, artist Jeff Koons and Louvre museum director Henri Loyrette were just a few of the art world movers and shakers who flew into Abu Dhabi this week for the launch of Abu Dhabi Art. The event, a “cultural platform” including an art fair, was put together at breakneck speed this summer by the Emirati authorities and continues until tomorrow. The fair counts just 50 dealers but includes heavyweights such as Gagosian, White Cube, Hauser & Wirth, L&M Arts, PaceWildenstein and Thaddaeus Ropac; for many, the prospect of selling art into museums on the multibillion-dollar Saadiyat Island project acted as a powerful magnet.

Compared with the previous, French-organised event, the new fair represents a quantum leap, with a stellar patrons’ committee including Pinault, Koons and architect Norman Foster; the quality – and value – of the art on offer have also leapt upwards.Continue Reading

Familiarity breeds contempt, the old adage goes. Perhaps that explains why this photo of Carla Bruni, now France’s first lady, failed to get anywhere near the reserve price during a Drouot auction over the weekend. It shows that the $91,000 price paid in New York for the same image during the April photography sales was just a fluke driven by the excitement over the former model and pop singer’s recent marriage to President Sarkozy.

New York Magazine says Art Basel Miami is going to be the same as it ever was this year, only different:

In a nod to the realities of the economy, Basel Miami is actually constraining some large-scale parties, says Lee Schrager of Southern Wine & Spirits, the fair’s liquor supplier and sponsor. That said, “there seem to be more non-official parties than ever this year.” Luxury goods are back on the beach. Montcler and Cartier are both hosting events. Pucci, which skipped last year, returns. Collectors are back, too: More museum groups than ever have arranged to tour the satellite Art Miami fair this year, says Nick Korniloff, its director—over a dozen.Continue Reading

Sarah Douglas conducted a wide-ranging interview with dealer Larry Gagosian published in The National for the Abu Dhabi art fair:

To Gagosian, however, the current slump cannot compare to the devastation of the depression that struck the art market at the start of the 1990s. “The early 1990s were an absolute nightmare,” he says. “It was brutal. I remember going to Sotheby’s in November of 1990. And usually after an auction you meet up with some friends – collectors and co-workers and other dealers – and you go out for dinner and have a good time. Back then, nobody wanted to talk to anybody. You were numb. You walked in, and half the auction didn’t sell. People weren’t even bidding. It was just unbelievable, because in May there had been an incredibly strong auction. Huge prices. Records for many artists. Vibrant market. It just turned on a dime. And the ensuing recession in the art market was absolutely the worst thing I’ve ever been through in my career as an art dealer. The phone literally didn’t ring.”Continue Reading

Felix Salmon had lunch with Jen Bekman, the entrepreneur who recently raised a significant amount of money to expand the business, and relates her philosophy:

“I want anyone who’s educated and even remotely affluent to feel self-conscious if they don’t have an art collection that they can talk about,” she says, and to that end she’s selling limited-edition art starting at just $20 for an 8″x10″ C-print in an edition of 200. (Hence the name.)

The editions are limited not because that makes them more likely to rise in value, necessarily, but rather because it helps to infect her buyers with the collector bug: they are incentivized to buy now, before an edition sells out; they get an experience which only a small number of other people will share; and they feel as though they’re part of a select group of people who are supporting a particular artist. Continue Reading

Once again, the Business Standard‘s excellent Kishore Singh gives art buying and investing advice to Indian collectors. But his wise words would be valuable for anyone in any art market. First, Singh cautions strongly against viewing art as an investment. The same buyers don’t expect their other luxury consumables to rise in value, so why should the art?

There is something not just naïve but puerile when a picture you want to wake up to in the morning in your bedroom, or want as a conversation point in the living room, must become an “investment”. You wouldn’t expect the same of the tiles in the bathroom, even though they might be more expensive than the art.

If you consider yourself an investor, there are some things you must take into consideration:Continue Reading

The chart above shows the long-term totals for Contemporary art sold in New York over the last five years. You can see the pronounced jump in 2007 and the first half of 2008 that represents the contemporary art bubble in all it’s glory. Behind the paywall, we do a more detailed analysis of auction totals and where we stand against the “new normal” in art sales.

[private_subscriber][private_bundle] Looking at the last five years in Contemporary art sales in New York we can see some interesting patterns. First, over the entire life of that market for five years the average total sale for all three houses including day and evening sales has been approximately $500m. The median sale during those years was $396m. The difference gives one a greater sense of the extent of the bubble.

As time goes on, it will be easier to let go of comparisons between current sales levels and those from the bubble years. Let’s follow the leading financial thinkers and call this the “new normal,” a re-calibration of expectations and a re-definition of success. To do a better job of resetting expectations, let’s look at what the last few years would have looked like without the bubble years. Removing 2007 and the Spring of 2008 from the totals and the numbers change significantly. The average sale falls to $322m but the median figure comes much closer at $308m.

Wouldn’t you know it, that $308m figure comes from this autumn’s cycle of Contemporary art sales. That means prices have regained a level that is close to an equilibrium point for the non-bubble year sales. In other words, while the rest of the economy has retreated significantly from pre-bubble levels, the art market is showing extraordinary strength by returning to mid-2005 levels.

Sotheby’s is wasting no time capitalizing on the strong New York sale of Contemporary art. Today, the auction house announced the Sammlung Lenz Shönberg Collectiong of ‘Zero Art’ as the highlight of the February sales in London. It’s a massive trove of 49 works that carry a combined estimate of £12m with examples of Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Gunther Uecker, Roman Opalka and Victor Vaserly.Continue Reading

Colin Gleadell moves the ball forward on a few Contemporary art items. Here he identifies some works rising and falling in value on the market. The first two items are examples of work that has fallen in value and had to be supported by the artist’s dealers:

an ornate mirror sculpture by Koons, which would have been estimated at over $2 million a year ago. Its new estimate was almost half that and it sold for $1.1 million to the artist’s dealer, Larry Gagosian.

The extent of the adjustments in value that have taken place was seen specifically when Christie’s re-offered works it had guaranteed in the boom, had not sold, and now owned. Among several examples last week which lost money for Christie’s was Maypole by the Belgian artist, Luc Tuymans. Offered and unsold at Christie’s in 2006 with a $1.6 million estimate, it re-emerged last week with a $500,000 estimate, and sold to the artist’s dealer, David Zwirner, for $722,500.

The second is the odd story of a Andy Warhol’s Michael Jackson portrait from the early 1980s. Over the Summer, we had the spectacle of a gallery putting the work on the market, taking it off, putting it back on the market for an unusual private auction and finally claiming that it sold to a “speculator” who intended to put it back on the market. Whatever the real story there, it did not put off Laurence Graff:Continue Reading

Jerry Saltz plays Joseph Welch to Tyler Green on NY Mag’s Culture Vulture blog this week. The post provoked an unusually fawning response from Green but not a yielding one. Here’s Saltz expressing his frustration at Green’s Manichean complaints about the Joannou show at the New Museum:

One of the main things that suggested all this indignation had gone too far was the witch-hunt tone of an editorial in the November issue of the Art Newspaper. The language in the piece — written by art blogger Tyler Green and published at the end of last week — was scolding, scornful, condescending, and smug, tinged with a verbal violence that was a little scary. The editorial begins with the false charge that private collector exhibitions are “fluff shows.” Green sniffs that he’s “especially disappointed” in the New Museum, and finishes by beseeching all museums to “cancel” exhibitions of private collections. He demands that the Association of Art Museums “ban” these shows because they are “an insult” to the art world. When I hear a word like “ban,” I reach for my dictionary and review the definition of the word democracy.

This kind of apparatchik rule-making feels off to me. Green has gotten into the habit of demanding that people be fired, reprimanded, or punished, as if only he knows right from wrong. He played a role in getting Grace Gluck fired from the Times for her “conflict of interest.” After Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune talked about his dual roles as a critic and an employee of an art fair, Green accused him of indulging “a textbook case of unethical conflict-of-interest” that struck “at the very heart of … integrity” and “flouted journalistic norms.” Continue Reading